Two digital companies with serious ambitions in the at-home care space – Hero and Assure Health – have partnered.
Both are relatively new companies. Hero is a at-home, digital medication management platform, a company that hopes to become much more than that as it grows older. Meanwhile, Assure Health is an at-home remote patient monitoring (RPM) and remote therapy monitoring (RTM) platform.
The partnership will combine Assure Health’s RTM platform with Hero’s medication
management platform. Together, their goal is to reach more Medicare beneficiaries as they seek new partners.
The new RTM codes in Medicare – which are part of an effort to broaden digital health by the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) – lend more momentum to Assure Health’ mission and also make it a more valuable partner for Hero.
“Assure is a great partner for us for a number of different reasons,” Hero’s CEO and founder, Kal Vepuri, told Home Health Care News. “One reason is that they’re progressive in thinking about RTM, as we are. … And getting into all of the major pockets of Medicare, from a geographic perspective, is also critical. From an access, commitment and partnership perspective, it just makes sense.”
Hero also recently struck a deal with the Henry Ford Health System, one of its first major health system partnerships.
That partnership was significant in that it also entered Hero into an arena they very much want to be in: home-based care. Henry Ford Health System has a robust at-home care arm.
“We’re really focused on improving health care outcomes by integrating tightly with our provider partners, making sure that we’re a tool for home care partners that need to manage medication and do it in a way that improves satisfaction and engagement from those patients,” Vepuri told HHCN at the time.
In the long run, both Hero and Assure Health feel that combining forces will help drive growth for each company.
“I think one of the keys in digital health is the ability to partner seamlessly and scale in populations that could benefit meaningfully from digital health solutions,” Vepuri said. “And when you think about digital in home care in particular, as we aim to continue to scale our offering in that particular market, providing successful roadmaps for those partnerships is critical.”
Jeff Nadel, the CEO and co-founder of Assure Health, is a serial entrepreneur. He founded the company with co-founder and COO Craig Bolz as they decided where to go next with their entrepreneurial endeavors.
After witnessing the experiences of people close to them in health care, they found the system to be illogical and inefficient. From subsequent learnings, Assure Health was launched.
“It is an unreasonable expectation that a 73-year-old with four chronic conditions, who goes to the doctor twice per year, is going to be okay,” Nadel told HHCN. “I think the conclusion that we came to very quickly is that you have a health care system that delivers care in this fragmented, episodic way. And on the other hand, you have this massive population of folks who are managing chronic conditions that are the leading cause of bad outcomes and high cost in that system.”
Assure Health is the remote patient monitoring platform for Michigan State University Health Care as well as Higi, which is a consumer health management company.
The changes to RTM by CMS – which differs from RPM in that it focuses on the non-physiologic factors for a patient, such as therapy or medication adherence – offer an opportunity for companies like Assure Health, Nadel believes.
“It offers an opportunity to have the ability to keep a finger on the pulse of those non-physiologic data points that allow us to monitor the extent to which a patient is being adherent to their therapy regimen, and that’s really important,” Nadel said. “There’s almost a $300 billion cost of medication non-adherence [in the U.S.], so it makes sense to enable a program like this.”
Both Vepuri and Nadel are developing quantitative and qualitative goals for the partnership and hope to move quickly.
But one thing that remains top of mind is working with home-based care providers.
“We think there’s a huge opportunity there,” Nadel said. “The way we kind of think about that space is that the folks who are delivering those services are playing such an important role in that patient’s life. Now, the question is, how do we give them superpowers?”
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